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There are benefits to exploring a new city on a bus tour—you get ferried around to all the best sites, you have an overly enthusiastic guide who will regale you with fun facts and helpful information, and, at the end, there will be a great place to buy souvenirs. The downside? The point when you realize you’re one of those people who take bus tours.

Ross Paxton captures these snap-happy tourists in his series A General History of Timeless Landscapes. He spent two years photographing some 25 sightseeing buses and boats across the United Kingdom. They feature rumpled moms, dads, reluctant teens, and grandparents jostled past noteworthy buildings and landmarks. Despite the stigma and cringe-worth elements, Paxton came to love it. “To be honest, I quite enjoyed them,” he says. “They offer a whistle stop tour of the towns, but that’s life for everybody really … we’re all just trying to experience the world.”

The photographer began the project in 2012 while visiting his hometown Whitby, famously known as the location novelist Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. On a whim, Paxton hopped on a double-decker bus tour with his medium format camera. A photograph from that day shows rows of squinting tourists surveying the landscape, while the 16th century ruins of Whitby Abbey—one of Dracula’s former haunts—fade from view. Paxton loved how the composition toyed with time. “It added up the past, the present, and the future,” he says. “The people were all gazing toward their futures and had the memory of the past behind them.”

Over the next two years, Paxton spent most his holidays absorbing a general history of his homeland while chasing similar shots. He took tours of scenic spots he’d never visited—like the ancient Isle of Bute, known for its mysterious standing stones, and the charming Lake District, an inspiration for illustrator Beatrix Potter’s beloved children’s tales. Sometimes no one was aboard when he first got on, so he’d go around a second or third time waiting for the bus—and occasional boat—to fill up. “I felt quite sick, to be honest,” he says. “You were facing backwards and the tripod was wobbling all over the place.”

He typically set up his large format camera and tripod at the head of the bus or boat facing the passengers. The old-fashioned camera was an unorthodox choice of gear for a moving bus: he had to prefocus it and insert a dark slide just before he pressed the shutter, which meant he couldn’t actually see the shot while he was taking it. Film is costly and the process was tedious, but Paxton liked the way the camera set people at ease. “You’re not just a tourist turning around with a little digital camera and pointing it back at the people taking pictures,” he says. “You stand out, and it almost gives you permission to take pictures. People don’t see it as a threat because of what it is.”

In each photo, tourists young and old look out on rolling hills, moody lakes and historic town centers in a way that’s banal and quietly humorous. Some crane their necks to see past other passengers blocking the passing landscape, while others gaze ahead at the view unfolding on the horizon. There’s a satisfying irony in observing the observers, yet there’s nothing cheeky about Paxton’s images.

Instead, they’re a poignant reflection on the human relationship to the landscape—the way it outlives us, bears our history and reminds us of things that might otherwise pass from memory. Much like photographs do. “We’re temporal beings, and we’re only here for a short period of time,” Paxton says. “A lot of the things in the photographs have been here for a lot longer than we have. Photographs freeze that temporal nature of life, especially in a situation where things are all moving—it’s a bit of a paradox really.”

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